Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new data storage and transmission technology that refutes the famous law on processor performance.
Technically, Moore's Law emerged as a simple observation: In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noticed an interesting pattern in the emerging computer electronics industry: the number of transistors per square inch of integrated circuits has steadily doubled every year. Based on this observation, he predicted that the computing power of computers would increase (and decrease in cost) exponentially approximately every 2 years. He later revised his "law" and reduced the time limit to 18 months as the pace of production began to slow down, but the message became an integral part of our understanding of the principles of computer science, electronics and economics.
Over the past decades, the definition of the law has changed, and it itself has been challenged many times. Now it seems the time has come to abandon this rule altogether. In a new study published this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has demonstrated unusual magnetic properties of systems that could significantly improve data storage methods in the near future.
A new word in storage
Currently, data is read and written on a "one bit at a time" basis, which is achieved by changing the localization of magnetic particles. Instead, the new method uses so-called "skyrmions" - virtual particles based on small perturbations in the orientation of magnetic elements - coupled with electric fields. These particles have proven to be able to store data for much longer than traditional systems.
Jeffrey Beach, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, conducted a study that first described the existence of skyrmions back in 2016. In it, he demonstrated that virtual particles can be created in specific locations, whereas previously it was believed that their location was random when generated. This is what allowed the specialists to develop an improved version of the data storage technology.
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Today, physical storage capacities generally follow Moore's Law. Be that as it may, this technology has almost reached its limit, and if we replace it with a more advanced one, based on the same skyrmions, then the law itself could not only be rewritten, but completely eliminated. The main reason why so far the developments have not gone beyond laboratory dungeons are in the methods of reading information from new media. To achieve these goals, X-ray microscopy can be used, but such equipment is expensive and practically inaccessible to the average layman, so it is impractical to install it on laptop computers.
The future of information technology
There are other methods for reading data, but all of them are still on paper. It is the creation of realistically cost-effective, cheap and usable hardware for PCs that will become one of the main challenges for engineers in the next few years.
Regardless, the era of Moore's Law is definitely coming to an end. He regularly proved his case for decades, since computer science itself was a very innovative direction of science, but now technology has come to the next stage of its development. This is not just about the abolition of the formal law, but also about changing the very ideas of a person about what capacities can be achieved by processing and storing data.
Vasily Makarov
